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IN MEIMORIAM. 



ADDRESS 



HON. CHAUXCEY M. DEPEW 

OF NEW YORK, 



UPON THE 



Lll-E A\D CHARACTER 



HON. GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 

(Late a Senator from the State of Massachusetts), 



DELIVERED IX THE 



SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, 



Saturday, January 28, 1905. 



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A.VJS.SHIXGTOX. 

1905. 



ELU 

.H us 114- 



ADDRESS 

OF 

HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



MEMORIAL ADDRESSES OX THE LATE SENATOR ItOAR. 

Mr. LODGE. Mr. President, before sending the resolutions 
to tlie desk I wish to state, as I have been asked to do, that the 
Senator from Wisconsin [Mr. Spooner], who was very anxious 
to be here to-day and to speak to tlie resolutions, and whose 
long friendship with Mr. IIoak is well known to the Senate, is 
unfortunately prevented suddenly by illness from coming ; he is 
unable to leave his house. I now send the resolutions to the 
desk. 

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Massa- 
chusetts submits resolutions, which will be read. 

The Secretary read the resolutions, as follows : 

Resolved, That the Senate haf? heard with profound sorrow of the 
(loath of Hon. George F. Hoar, late a Senator from tlie State of Mas- 
sachusetts. 

RcsolrcO. That as n mark of respect to the memory of the deceased 
the business of the Senate be now suspended to enable liis associates 
to pay propel tribute to his high character and distinguished public 
services. 

Resolved. That the Secretary communnicate these resolutions to the 
House of Kopresentatives. 

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Will the Senate agree to the 
resolutions V 

The resolutions were unanimously agreed to. 

Mr. DEPEW. Mr. President, it is asserted by many writers 
that the Senate has seen its best days. Tliey claim that the 
statesmen who made this body famous in the earlier periods of 
our history have not had any successors of equal merit or genius. 
The Senate does not change, but- the questions which it must 
discuss and decide are new with each generation. There is a 
broad distinction between the elucidation and solving of prob- 
lems which relate to the foundations and upbuilding of in- 
stitutions, wliich are vital to their preservation and perpetuity, 
and the materialistic issues of finance, commercialism, and in- 
dustrialism. The one arouses in the orator every faculty of 
his mind, every possibility of his imagination, every aspira- 
tion of his sotil, and every emotion of his heart, while the others 
demand mainly the aptitude and experience of the college pro- 
fessor or the expert or student on subjects which affect the for- 
tunes of the factory, the mill, the furnace, and the farm. 

Webster cotild command the attention of listening Senates and 

of an anxious and expectant country with orations which have 

become part of our best literature and educate the youth of our 

schools on interpretations of the Constitution of the United States 

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upon wliicli (lepoiul tlio life or death of liberty. But Webster 
could hold only temporiiry interest and a narrow andienee on 
tarift" schedules upon wool or lumber, upon iron or cotton fabrics, 
or upon bimetallism or the single standard. Hamilton and Jef- 
ferson and their antagonistic schools were creating with little 
precedent to guide them a form of government in which liberty 
and law would give the largest protection to the individual citizen 
and maintain ord(>r and promote the greatest happiness of the 
mass. The one believed these results could best be obtained by 
centralized power, the other by its distribution among the States. 
There was then brought into play the loftiest creative and con- 
structive genius which the world has known, 

Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, the Senatorial triumvirate, who 
attained the zenith of Senatorial fame, made their reputations 
and that of this body upon the discussion of imjjlied powers in 
the Constitution, affecting not only the nation's life but the 
destruction or pepetuity of human slavery. Webster, in that 
immortal speech, which educated millions of our youth to rush 
to arms when the Republic was in danger, preached from the 
text of " Libert5' and union, now and forever, one and insep- 
arable." Calhoun saw clearly the extinction of slavery with the 
growth of the country and brought to the defense of the system 
resources, intellectual and logical, never equaled ; while Clay 
postponed the inevitable through compromises which were 
adopted because, of his passionate pleas of marvelous eloquence 
for peace and unity. So in the acute stage of the controversy, 
which resulted in the civil war and ended in the enfranchise- 
ment of the slaves, Sev>'ard here and Lincoln on the platform, 
were appealing to that higher law of conscience, which uplifts 
the orator and audience to a spiritual contemplation of things 
material. 

Happily the v>-ork of the founders in one age and the saviors 
in another has left to us mainly the development, upon indus- 
trial lines, of our country's resources and capabilities. We pro- 
duced no heroes in over half a century, and yet when the war 
drums called the nation to arms, Grant, from the tannery, and 
Lee, from a humble position in the Army, rose to rank among 
the great captains of all the ages. Had the civil war never 
occurred. Grant would have lived a peaceful and modest mer- 
cantile life in a country town of Illinois, and Lee would have 
passed the evening of his days in equal obscurity upon the 
retired list of the United States Army. Better, if the contest 
can be honorably averted, that a hero should never be known 
than that his discovery should be brought about by the calami- 
ties of war, the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, and 
the distress, demoralization, and devastation of civil strife. 

We pay our tribute to-day to one who in any of these great 
periods would have stood beside the most famous, to one who, 
having the experience of a longer continiious term in Congress 
than any other citizen ever enjoyed, testilied on all occasions to 
the increasing power, growth, and beneficent influence of this 
body, and to the ever advancing purity of x\merican public life. 
His education and opportunities, his singularly intimate con- 
nection with the glorious past and the activities of the present, 
made him a unique and in a measure an isolated figure. He 
was educated under conditions and in surroundings which de- 

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veloped for the public service conscience, heart, and imagina- 
tion. A lawyer of the first rank by heredity, study, and practice, 
he nevertheless approached public questions, not from the 
standpoint of the pleader but the orator ; not as an advocate 
with a brief, but as a patriot with a mission. He cast his first 
vote in 1847, when all the fire of his youth had been aroused 
by the slavery agitation. He came actively into politics the 
year after, when the Democratic party had divided into the 
Free Soil and slavery men, and the Whig party was split 
between the adherents of conscience or cotton. He began his 
career upon the platform and his preparation for the public 
service as a conscience Whig. 

He saw the preparation, through the American or Know- 
Nothing party, in which Whigs and Democrats were acting 
together, of an organization upon broader lines. No one 
worked harder or more intelligently for the fusion of men of 
opposite CTeeds on industrial questions, but of one mind in oppo- 
sition to slavery, into a National Constitutional Antislavery 
party. When that party came into existence in 1856 with a 
Presidential candidate and platform it had no more ardent 
sponsor for its faith and its future than Senator Hoar. A 
party whose fundamental creed was liberty for all men of 
every race and color appealed to the poetic and sentimental 
side of our friend and to the revolutionary ideas with which he 
was saturated. He came to believe that the worst which the 
Republican party might do would be more beneficial to the 
country than the best which its opp.onent was capable of. 
Though often differing from- his party associates, his combat was 
to accomplish his purposes within the lines. He bowed to the 
will of the majority in his action, without surrendering his 
individual convictions as to the wisdom of the policy. He 
claimed, and with much reason, that the party had come after 
repeated trials, in many instances, to his way of thinking, and 
if those who went .outside of the breastworks and lost all 
influence had remained with him his ideas would sooner have 
been adopted. Yv'e have here the explanation of the only criti- 
cism which has ever been passed upon his public acts. As in 
the Hawaiian and Panama questions, where his eloquence 
gave comfort to the opposition and grieved his friends, his 
votes supported the position of the majority and the policies of 
the Administration. 

It was a high privilege to be a member of the Judiciary Com- 
mittee of the Senate under his chairmanship. It was a court 
presided over by a great lawyer. Witla courteous deference 
to the members, bills were sent to subcommittees, but when the 
subcommittee made its report, they found that the questions 
had been exhaustively examined before by the chairman. The 
subcommittee which had perfunctorily done its work received 
in the form of a polite statement and exposition of the case the 
report which, if they had attended to their duties, they ought 
to have made. This work required not only vast legal knowl- 
edge and accurate judgment but prodigious industry. It was 
that rare condition of mind where work becomes a habit, and 
with Senator Hoar when the committee or the Senate or law 
or literature failed to give him occupation, he would pass the 
idle hours in translating Thucydides or some other Greek author 
into English. 
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In the examination at the dose of the last session, before the 
Committee on Privileges and Elections, of the president and 
apostles of the Mormon Church, himself a close student of all 
theologies and an eminent Unitarian, he was aroused b.v the 
claim of divine inspiration for the words and acts of the Mor- 
mon ai)ostles. lie drew from President Smith the statement 
that the action of his predecessor, President Woodruff, in re- 
versing the doctrine of polygamy, heretofore held by the 
church, was directly inspired by God, and then made him tes- 
tify that thoiigh living under the insj^iration of the presidency 
of the church he was also living in direct violation of that 
revelation by remaining a polygamist. In the course of a long 
cross-examination he drew from Apostle Lyman statements of 
doctrine and beliefs, and subsequently contradictions of these 
positivons, and then forced the apostle to swear that both the 
assertion and the contradiction were inspired by God. 

At the age of fort.v-three he was at the cross-roads of his 
career. He had reached a position at the bar which placed 
within his grasp the highest rewards of the profession of 
the law. The country was entering upon an era of specu- 
lation, of railroad building, the bankrujitcy and reorganization 
of combinations of capital in the creation and consolidation 
of corporations, which called for the highest talents and 
the best equipment of lawyers. Questions as to the power 
of the General Government over corporations created by 
States and the powers of the States as to limitations and 
confiscations of corporations engaged in interstate commerce in- 
terested capital and labor, shippers, and investors. The largest 
fees and fortunes ever known in the history of the practice of the 
law came to those who demonstrated their ability during these 
wonderful years. On the threshold of this temple of fortune 
Gud fame at the bar Mr. Hoar was elected to the United States 
Senate. lie knew that he lived in a State whose traditions 
were to keep its public men who merited its confidence con- 
tinuousl.y in Congress. He felt that in the great questions still 
unsolved which had gi-own out of the civil war and the mar- 
velous development of the country he could perform signal pub- 
lic service. His decision was made. The courts lost a great 
lawyer, tlie Senate gained a great statesman, and he lived and 
died a poor man. 

I spent a memorable night with Mr. Gladstone when in a remi- 
niscent mood, and with a masterful discrimination and eloquence 
he conversed upon the traditions of the House of Commons dur- 
ing the sixty years of his membership. As the stately proces- 
sion of historic men and measures came into view, they were 
inspired by the s])eaker with all the characteristics and methods 
of tlieir period. The changes which had occurred were detailed 
by a master who loved and revered the Conunons. Senator Hoar 
would do this for the thirty-seven years of his activities in 
Congress, but with a wit and humor which Gladstone lacked, 
lie remembered the sarcasm, or the ridicule, or the epigram, or 
the witticism, or the illustration which had not onl,y illumed but 
ended the debate, and the opposing debater. 

^^'e read with wonder of the nights when Samuel Johnson 
gathered about him Goldsmith and lUirke and Reynolds and 
Garrick ; and Boswell could make immortal volumes of their 
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conversations, especially at this time when conversation is be- 
coming a lost art, because the shop has invaded the drawing- 
room and the dinner table, and card.s have captured society. 

But Senator Hoar knew his favorites among the Greek and 
Roman classics, and the Bible and Shakespeare by heart. He 
could quote with a familarity of frequent reading and retentive 
memory from the literature of the period of Queen Elizaljeth 
and of Queen Anne, as well as the best of modern authors, and 
he was a member of that coterie which met weekly at Parker's, 
in Boston, where Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, and others 
reproduced for our day, and in better form, the traditions of the 
Johnsonian Parliament, and where the Senator and his brother 
were the quickest and the wittiest of the crowd. 

Whether in conversation or debate there never has been in the 
American Congress a man so richly cultured and with all his 
culture so completely at connnand. 

The statesmen of the Revolution were with Senator Hoar 
living realities. The men of the present were passing figiires, 
fading into obscurity, compared with these immortals. In a 
remarkable speech he said of the signers of the Declaration : 
" We, not they, are the shadows." On his father's side, his 
grandfather, two great grandfathers, and three uncles were in 
Lincoln's company at Concord Bridge, and his mother was a 
daughter of Roger Sherman, whom he thought the wisest and 
ablest of the members of the Continental Congress. He v/as 
the only person who signed all four of the great state papers 
to which the signatures of the Delegates of the different Col- 
onies were attached : The Association of 1774, the Articles of 
Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Con- 
stitution of the United States. 

Plis mother remembered, as a little girl, sitting on Yv'ash- 
ington's knee and hearing him talk, and her sister, the mother 
of William M. Evarts, when a child of 11, opened the door 
for General Washington as he was leaving the house after his 
visit to her father, Roger Sherman. The General, with his 
stately courtesy, " put his hand on her head and said, ' My little 
lady, I wish you a better office.' She dropped a courtesy and 
answered, quick as lightning, ' Yes, sir ; to let you in.' " He 
lived all his life in this atmosphere of his youth. The marvelous 
results of the working of the principles of the charter framed 
in the cabin of the Mayfloiccr for "just and equal laws," and of 
the Declaration of Independence in the development of orderly 
liberty for his countrymen, convinced him that the same rights 
and privileges would end as happily, after trial, with the negroes 
of the South and the people of the Philippine Islands and of the 
Russian Empire. It was a matter with him not of pride or 
boastfulness, but of sustaining povt'er under responsibilities that 
in every Congress from the beginning had been a rejn-esentative 
of the Sherman clan. I was distantly I'elated to him by the 
same tie, and he exhibited an elder brotherly and almost 
fatherly watchfulness and care for me when I entered the 
Senate. 

His cousins, William M. Evarts and Roger Minot Sherman, 
were the foremost advocates of their periods, his father emi- 
nent at the bar, and his brother Attorney-General of the United 
States, and yet he would have been the equal of either as a law- 
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yer if lie had r-liniheil for its leadorsliip. It lias been the high 
privilege of his colleagues here to meet, converse, work, and de- 
bate with a ;\Ia.vflower Puritan, possessed of all the cidture and 
learning of the twentieth century, but with the virtues, the prej- 
udices, the lilces and dislikes, the vigor and coin-age of the 
I'ilgrim Fathei's. neither softened nor weakened by the looseness 
of creeds nor the luxury of living of to-day. As our friend the 
Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Lodge] said in his most dis- 
criminating and eloquent eulogy — the best, I think. I have ever 
heard as a tril»ute of an associate and friend — Senator Hoar 
would have died like a martyr for his principles. In 18.">0 he de- 
livered a speech in ]Mechanics' Hall, at Worcester, upon the evils 
of slavery and the crime of its extension into the Territories, 
which attracted general attention and was widely published. 
Fifty-f')iu' years afterwards he ^^'as again before an audience 
in Mechanics' Hall, compo.sed of the children and grandchildren 
of the first. 

The dread sunnnons had then come to him. and he had but few 
days to live. The old warrior spoke with the fire of his early 
manhood, but his message to his neighbors and countrymen after 
a half century was not of war. as before, but of peace, love, and 
triumph. The progress and development of the Kepultlic during 
these fifty years of liberty was his theme. He looked joyously 
upon the past and present and was full of hope and confidence 
for the future. He had finished his work and performed a 
great part in great events of great moment for his country and 
humanity, and he left to his contemporaries and posterity the 
brilliant exami»lo of a life nobly lived. 
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